The soulful singer and songwriter opens up on how she was bullied because of the deepness of her voice.
In an interview with THE CUT, an American women’s magazine, Tems disclosed that people found her voice weird. She was not very social and the other kids would bully her to the point of tears. She added that she eventually made friends and would force them to sing her song.
An excerpt from the interview reads: “In her mid-teens, she briefly abstained from listening to other people’s music as a monkish way to preserve her inchoate sound. By High school, the ruthlessness of children fully developed with renewed malignancy. She still didn’t speak much, didn’t have much of a social circle and her status as an outcast made her an object of ridicule.”
Oftentimes, she received unsolicited advice and comments from strangers, outside school, regarding her voice. This contributed to the dwindling of her self-esteem. She believed she sounded “like a boy, or a frog, or that her voice was otherwise ugly.”

She shared that, at a point, she resorted to singing in an artificial falsetto to the perplexity of her music teacher who encouraged her to sing with her real voice. It was at that moment that she embraced her abilities. “I thought, if you think I sound like a man, I think that’s pretty cool – I’m gonna sound more like a man”, she shared.
Tems’ distinct tone is her selling point. Her songs can be groovy, soulful, jazzy or minimal as she does not conform to a particular genre. The thrilling artist said she was not interested in the standard happy-go-lucky Afrobeats and she wanted to make songs people can cry to – songs that bring emotional clarity.